Griddle chef's courgette
...the Prince of vegetables
I’ve written that subject line and now I’m going to sit back and enjoy that I did that. No notes.
Most people are on holiday here, but, before you read about hot, “penis-sized courgettes” (our Food & Drink Editor Max’s words, not mine), might as well remind you that we’ve got our Yard Party this Thursday - free pizza from Homeslice, beers from Gipsy Hill Brew, BuzzBallz from BuzzBallz, music from Mr Thing and Chris P Cuts and speedy portraits for charity by Nettie Wakefield, Daniel David Freeman, Elisa Terranera and James-Lee Duffy.
It’s sold out so I don’t know why I’m giving it such a hard sell really – just showing off. There’s no more room on the list… unless you find any of our emails and send a nice message and we might be able to help.
Max Halley loves courgettes
Our Food & Drink Editor eats his greens
People never seem to think courgettes are as delicious as I do. Do I have a soft spot for something that isn’t really very good, or doesn’t really have much flavour? Have I been duped by a vegetable? Or is it just that most people aren’t really sure what to do with them?
I had five or six extremely large-penis-sized courgettes, freshly harvested from the fecund plants in my patch and I knew exactly what to do with them. I topped and tailed them and chopped each one into eight(ish) large round pieces and got a big pan on a high heat. I fried them hard, on full blast, in LOADS of olive oil, for at least 10 minutes, until they were golden and blistered all over. I chunkily chopped up eight large garlic cloves and threw them in the pan accompanied by a massive sprig of fresh oregano and about 250ml of ‘zesty’ white wine from the supermarket bag-in-box I keep in the cupboard for cooking. The pan was so hot the wine boiled almost immediately and I scraped and scraped at the bottom to get all the bits off and combined them with the rapidly evaporating liquid. I boiled the kettle and before all the wine had gone, I banged 500ml boiling water into the pan, turned the heat down a bit, sprinkled loads of salt in, put the lid on askew and left the thing to bubble and boil, stirring it occasionally, for about an hour. At this point, the liquid had almost completely gone and lots of nice looking gooey oily goodness remained. I took the pan off the heat, squeezed a whole lemon’s juice in, stirred it all up and left the pot to cool and sit for a few hours with the lid on.
Some of courgette pieces had broken down completely and turned into that delicious moosh and others had maintained their shape – that’s life. A large percentage of the water in the courgettes had been cooked out of them and they were now 10/10 delicious. We had them for supper, at room temperature, with posh mozzarellas I got in the deli, with some lemon zest and more oregano sprinkled on, and it was one of my favourite plates of food of the year. Not so much a gap in the market, as a chasm: I must write a book about courgettes. Max’s Courgette Book anyone? Cooking with Courgettes? Max Cooks Courgettes? The Big Courgette Book? Hahahahhahahah!
